IMDb user comments for
Caótica Ana (2007)

advertisement

Filter:

Best Chronological Prolific Authors Loved It Hated It Hide Spoilers:

Index

6 comments in total

---

12 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :-
The most intense movie I've ever seen, 4 November 2007

Author: adley padley from United Kingdom

I have been lucky to see Julio Medem's films at several film festivals over the years and he always manages to captivate his audience. I was fortunate enough to attend the UK premiere of his new masterpiece Caotica Ana at the London Film Fstival recently. He is arguably one of Spain's all time most important film makers, for example Stanley Kubrick said that Medem's "The Red Squirrel" was one of his all time favourite films and Steven Spielberg offered Medem the chance to direct "Zorro", which he later turned down to spend more time developing his own movies.

Caotica Ana is one of Medem's best films to date, beautifully filmed, beautifully acted and with an intensely captivating story of reincarnation and never ending love. Manuela Velles as Ana is enchanting and lights up the screen, Charlotte Rampling turns in a good performance in her first ever Spanish speaking role, Bebe provides much laughter and Asier Newman is simply hypnotic, exuding vulnerability and charisma. Sequences are at times "Chaotic" as per the title but are necessary to build emotional attachment to the story. The change between chaos and calm being personified in many ways through Ana's final journey to New York by boat, travelling on stormy and more tranquil waters. Overall a must see movie, very different to anything you have ever seen before and a real homage to the importance of women in society throughout the ages.

---

11 out of 20 people found the following comment useful :-
Disappointing movie of a great director, 16 September 2007

Author: abisio from Miami

After the wonderful "Lovers of the Arctic Circle" and his masterpiece "Sex and Lucia" (the last almost seven years ago) my expectations on Julio Medem's follow up movie were very high and for that reason I rushed to see "CAOTIC ANA" at the Toronto Film Festival. To my disappointment, this movie is just as its title CAOTIC. A sad demonstration that some interesting or even original ideas by no means end up as a good movie.

Ana is a young painter living in IBIZA with his widow father. One day she meets Justine (the great Charlotte Rampling) who offers education and economic support to perfect her artistic skills if she moves to Madrid. Ana starts "feeling" the big city and the new life (it is a sensorial feeling; she is be far from shy or at least she has no problems in being nude for art's sake or to take a bath in the ocean or for many other reasons). One of her new "feelings" is Said; a young Arab and fellow student which Ana gets involved and obsessive in love (like Lucia in "Sex"). In short time, Ana starts having strange daydreams and seizures until a professional hypnotist finds out she had lived many previous lives and all of them ending with terrible deaths at a very young age (around 22 years old). This discovery plus something said by Ana (she speaks different languages while hypnotized) causes Said to run away without any explanation. In order find out what happened with Said she accepts being part of a hypnotic treatment, trying to investigate her previous lives (and deaths). The only condition, she does not want to remember anything about the session, unless is related to Said. Many more things occur and for reasons that do not make a lot of sense she ends up in USA where she is submitted to the last "session" to find out the truth. Even when the idea looks interesting; the unrealistic chain of events, many of them too forced, harms the narrative. No character in the movie (which includes very well known European actors like Rampling or Luis Homar) has any deep or definition. They are mostly pieces put there to generate a situation or a dialog; we do not get to properly know Ana since her only motivation seems to be finding Said; and even this mystery (which drives the movie ) is easily predictable. Medem (like Bergman in his own way) has a personal concept about love and human relations and all his movies make reference to the stupid choices and things people do and consequences in everybody's lives. He never really made a lineal or realistic story; just a chain of events aligned to show his theory. This concept worked fine in previous movies; because in some way everything (albeit not always logically) got connected and made sense; which is not the case here. Many ideas seem to be thrown in the mix (not all of them really good or original) but like water and oil did not blend at all. Cohesion is missing in many moments (like the missing reels in GRINDHOUSE). The perfect example is the scene with the USA government functionary; a scene many people will probably enjoy (aside for the disgusting) but has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie. It is really sad because technically the movie is excellent; the paintings and the animations are outstanding, the locations are pure beauty but while Ana had many souls, this movie has none.

---

2 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Hummm, 9 May 2008

Author: ben-in-france from London, England

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Visually, the movie is beautiful. Wonderful landscapes and light throughout, as always with Medem.

In terms of the story, it's not very clear, a bit too mental to make sense. I enjoyed it until she got to New York and Said just re-appears like that, and what is that about the Irak war?? Suddenly, the story turned a bit too 'real' to make sense.

Good acting all round, though some characters are undeveloped: Charlotte Rampling's, the cute hypnotist etc...

Some strikingly beautiful moments though - Ana's recollection of dying in the desert (quite violent though), the animations, Ana dancing with her father etc...

---

9 out of 18 people found the following comment useful :-
A movie for or by an adolescent?, 13 September 2007

Author: doug-697 from Canada

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

An art student undergoes hypnosis to unlock repressed memories of past lives and discovers she has a unique place in human history.

Early in the movie I was just thinking it was a silly movie with superficial pseudo-hip observations about sex and life. As the movie continued I began the think that perhaps the movie was made with the intended audience being adolescent girls. For example, the guy who puts Ana under hypnosis to bring out her repressed memories is clearly too young to be taken seriously and the way the women talk about sex would not be considered sophisticated by most adult women, but in both cases might be interesting to 13 year olds. I was thinking that if the movie's target audience was young girls then based upon that it wasn't a bad movie.

However as the movie continued and began to makes it's political views more explicit I concluded it had actually been made by an adolescent girl. It's not the politics or the moral point of view that's silly, it's the fact that the director obviously thinks he's telling us something we don't know (Ex: men are responsible for all the wars in history! Hmmm...what a shocking new idea!)

Oddly enough, the final climactic scene, which is utterly naive and blatantly anti-American actually saves the movie. The silliness of everything that goes on before doesn't prepare you for as brutal a political statement as could ever be made. I don't agree with the statement (to say the least, by the way) but I have to admire the courage to put in on film.

However, the movie is incredibly silly and if you're a moderately well-read person, it probably won't have much to offer.

---

5 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
Scattered Ana, 6 February 2008

Author: johno-21 from United States

I saw this last month at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. The premise of this film was done before back in 1968 in the film Candy. You take a lovely nymph-like girl with a lot of hair and a beautiful body and build a series of disjointed, ridiculous sketch-like stories around her with the help of a big name actor or two and pretend it's a comedy. This film does the same except it pretends to be a drama. The films title character Ana (Manuela Vellés) is a gifted young artist living with her father Klaus (Matthias Habich) in a cave near Ibiza, Spain. Yes, they live in a cave but it's quite nice and richly appointed for a cave dwelling. Newcomer Vellés almost didn't have the role as it was originally attached to actress María Valverde who wisely bowed out and you can only imagine if it was her refusal to do a certain scene in this film. One day a wealthy art patron from France named Justine (veteran international talent Charlotte Rampling) discovers the artistic potential in Ana and wants to cultivate her talent by setting her up in her exclusive art colony she runs in Madrid. Ana meets Linda (Bebe Rebulleto) who becomes her best friend and Said (Nicolas Cazalé) who becomes her boyfriend. Ana discovers the doors to past lives through regressive hypnotism by an young American hypnotist named Michael (Asier Newman). The movie has you hooked for a while and you wonder where it's going to go but once she heads for New York it rapidly falls apart as a film trying to hard to be an art film with a political and social message. The film looks great with art direction by Montse Sanz and cinematography by Mario Montero and direction from the talented and celebrated, international film festival award winning Julio Medem. The film is dedicated to Medem's sister Ana Medem whose actual artwork are featured through the film. Her Picassoesque style painting were to be shown at an exhibit in Valencia when on her way there she was tragically killed in a car accident. I hate to be critical of a film dedicated to someone who represents such a personal loss to it's director but the story written by director Medem is so bad that I can't help it. Watching this film you realize that this guy knows how to make a film but you wonder why he didn't make one this time. It features some nudity and some prolonged unnecessary violence and I would give this a 5.5 out of 10 and not recommend it to a general audience.

---

14 out of 32 people found the following comment useful :-
Opening doors, 25 August 2007

Author: ruiresende84 (ruiresende84@gmail.com) from Porto, Portugal

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

This is really something. Any Medem film is a true event. Being able to watch such a master evolve, film by film is a privilege. Medem is on the top of cinematic innovation and exploration today, at this moment, and this film may be his highest achievement so far.

So this one is built with oppositions, scale oppositions, characters temperament oppositions, landscape oppositions. Ana is, herself, "chaotic", she holds inside the quietness of anonymous lives, and the burden of women's heritage. The first scene, with the birds, apparently so detached from the rest, Ana and the dirty senator, Ana and Linda, her friend.

(NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION) Medem's films have been always a reinvention of the love story, at once concerned about tenderness, human mind and visual cinematic storytelling innovation. The human soul is a huge iceberg from which we only see a short tip, and Medem's cinema always cared about the vast mass we don't see. This still matters here. But adding to that, there's a whole new dimension. This is a mark in Medem's career, and i would say in cinema, since he depicts new "scales" and new ambit to his cinema. He globalizes, and puts context into his once only dreamy, beautiful and tender world, that of "Lucia y el sexo" and "Los amantes..." One can't stop thinking about what this one shares with Babel, this is Medem's version of a contemporary global world.

And he is so deep here. He freely works with time and space, in several dimensions. Let's check:

. He works global space in being able to bring coherence to multiple stories, excerpts of lives, that pass all through Ana's mind (and Said, but Woman is the theme here). By global space i mean the world, let's call it realities, different countries and cultures no matter when we place it;

. He works linear time, the one that carries Ana from the beginning to the end of her physical journey (also made by global spacial exploration). Here is Medem as we had seen him before in "Lucia...", dream like editions, always putting the audience looking for what happened;

. The genius stroke: Medem adds historical time, working at once with various epochs, various "times", various contexts. Medem's own woman centered mythology finds in Ana the gate, or the passing point of every memory. This is the word, Medem brings memory to life.

(CINEMATIC CONCERNS) All this would be just intellectually ambitious, but it is all put together in such a cinematic way that i do believe this film will prevail as a mark to a new approach. This is fresh and unseen before:

. the cinematic devices: the edition, in the almost psychedelic moments in which all women from all times suffer at once, check the careful photography, always adequate to the situation but always coherent with the global work (duality once more).

. the presence of "cinema" as a "mood" that en-forms all actions in the character (and mostly in the Camera) of Linda: she always films, Ana always watch the films (as well as a crowd), and many times those films (as well as some scenes) come worked out as the installations/performances of the students from the art school. And there's a particular moment in which this becomes clear as water and which is when we watch the heads of an audiences in a room wathching one of those films (this scene will only work in a theater, preferably with other people sitting in front of you). This will lead you to another dimension that may already not be cinema, but performative art, in which you are participating. Genius.

. the unexpected use of animation, which intelligently starts "flat" and than becomes "deep", multidimensional, just like the whole construction as soon as Medem introduces his use of historical time.

(THEMES) Ultimately, this is about paying attention to fundamental (though many times forgotten) issues: we came from somewhere, and that en-forms who we are today, forgetting that is rejecting Culture, capital C. Medem cares.

"This column is doric, I am Greek", says Ana after being hit by a corrupt politician with a small doric column

My evaluation: 5/5, this is a cinematic essay, on my list of most important.

http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com

---

---

Add another comment

---

Related Links

Plot summary	Ratings	External reviews
Parents Guide	Official site	Plot keywords
Main details	Your user comments	Your vote history